5th . ALSFAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS of ALSFAL
Latin American Asocciation of Systemic Functional Linguistics
The Systemic- Functional Linguistics Association of Latin America

November 2- 7, 2009

Mar del Plata, Argentina
Facultad de Humanidades
Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. Mar del Plata, Argentina.

The Relationship between Lexico-grammar,
Register and Genre in Social Discourses

The 5th ALSFAL INTERNATIONAL  CONFERENCE has two main aims: 1. to show the latest developments of SFL in its different fields; 2. to discuss the impact SFL has in Latin America and the developments of the theory in Portuguese and Spanish, specially on the continent.

Language, understood as a resourse to mean, and its analysis find in SFL a place where language use can be described, explained and interpreted in the intersection of texts and their contexts.

Register and genre become especially relevant to understand language since speakers’ linguistic choices depend on the context of situation – the particular situations interactants participate in - and the context of culture these situations belong into. Speakers’ options get realised in the texts they produce in these contexts.

This makes the wide range of social discourses, the relationships between lexico-grammar, register and genre crucial to show that gramatical description has to be done taking into account register and interpreted on the basis of the context of culture texts are produced in.

SFL allows us to deal with a wide range of language uses the theory has been exploring from the moment it was created. SFL developments in relation with Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodality – to name only two relevant examples – show the reach of the theory that takes the instrumentalaity of language as one of its distinctive features.

This 5th edition of ALSFAL will go on exploring these issues.